On a recent visit to London’s Design Museum, I was thrilled to see a number of very interesting radio designs and models, some of which were familiar, and others I had never seen before.

Two which caught my eye were tiny Sony models from the mid 1980s.

The Sony FM RADIO SRF-201

One – the Sony SRF 201 -seems to be a little more well-known, and I’ve found plenty of information about it online, including some for sale, although it seems that the internal battery in most models is shot.

The SW One-Station Radio Clip T2

The other, which I’ve not found much about yet, and am hoping you or your readers might help with, seems to be known as ‘SW One-Station Radio Clip T2‘. It looks as though it might be a branded/promotional model for Radio Tampa, and seems to be pre-set to, or allows tuning on, shortwave between 3.945/6.115/9.760 MHz. Possibly this one is more recent than the 1980s, looking at the earphones.

I’m having trouble finding much online about the second radio, and wondered if you could help shed some light on it? I can’t even find a ‘Radio Tampa’!

Unfortunately, while the museum has great iPads at each section with some more information, the unit at the Sony section was not functioning!

Post readers: If you can shed some more light on the SW One-Station Radio Clip T2, please comment!

Thanks for sharing this, Paul. I have a soft spot for credit card radios since I used to sneak one into my 5th grade class and listen to FM stations. Somehow, I never got caught!

I’m not sure if anyone monitors new replies to older posts, but this Twitter thread reminded me of these cute little Sony Clip radios, and sheds new light on their form factor, including that they had interchangeable ‘cards’! Really cool.

Commerical POP music stations (on shortwave) is I think a really interesting part of shortwave radio history. At the last SWL Winter Fest, I picked up a Sony radio guide (for Japanese teens) from these times. Sony was promoting shortwave radio listening to Japanese teens quite actively and many of the commercials on air were for Sony. Other advertisers included Coke etc.

As I wrote above the two main stations were Radio Tampa and KYOI Super Rock (pronounced KOI as in the Japanese Fish). Both were heard her in Australia easily each night and so I listen to them really frequently while studying etc.

Yes, Radio Tampa = what is now known as Radio Nikkei. I’m sure I have a Radio Tampa QSL (from the 1980’s I guess it would be) when I get home from travels I will dig it out.

I listen to Radio Nikkei often, but when it was Radio Tampa it was slightly different – from memory the programming was Top 40 pop presented in a Japanese imitation of a USA commercial station format. Another great station back in those days was KYOI – Super Rock. Shortwave radio listening was a massive hobby for teenagers in Japan back then so the idea of Top 40 music on commercial radio shortwave stations made some sense. But that said neither station I think actually found the business model to be profitable.

That’s a really useful point – thanks so much for commenting. I wonder if there was a ‘T1’, too, or if the output of Radio Nikkei 2 (or Tampa, or whatever!) lent itself to doing a promotional pocket radio? (Maybe sports output, etc?)

Good catch! Any backstory on how these little receivers came to be? They must have been regional to Japan given the frequency span of the receivers. There has to be only a vanishingly few that exist in N. America. What a cool fnd!

Not a SRF-201, but I owned a near-identical (Hanimex branded?) knockoff years ago – would’ve been the mid-late 80’s – that covered the full Australian / ITU region 1 band. So the style at least wasn’t restricted to Japan.

(It was probably tossed during a move – the battery was dead & I think leaking – but it may still be buried in one of my junkboxes somewhere…)

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